


When Everything was Ruined Forever - Sort of

by Truth



Category: True Meaning of Smekday - Adam Rex
Genre: Boov, Gen, Happy Mouse Kingdom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 16:00:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2234931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>-	and do I really need to remind you that aliens just blew up the Snow Queen’s Castle?</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Everything was Ruined Forever - Sort of

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jadelennox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadelennox/gifts).



It used to be that everybody had a story about where they were on Smeckday. Most of the stories boiled down to ‘and then aliens’ which, when everyone has the same ending to their story, loses the element of surprise really, really quickly.

My Smeckday story isn’t any more exciting than anyone else’s. In fact, there were probably several thousand people with the exact same story.

“My family spent a ton of money to have Christmas at Happy Mouse Kingdom, the Nicest Place on Earth, and then aliens made the Snow Queen’s Castle melt and everything was ruined forever.”

If what happened after that hadn’t been so additionally traumatic, I’m sure we’d all still be in therapy.

Really, the story of what happened after most of the Snow Queen’s Castle silently vanished, is what makes my story different. Not better, mind you. Just different.

See, my little sister Anuncia and I have what is commonly referred to as ‘a tragic back story’. Our mom and dad met at university, where mom was studying medicine and dad was learning about chemistry. Dad was just learning English, and English was mom’s third language and they had no others in common. The conflicting accents apparently made their dating life a series of hilarious misunderstandings. 

Love conquers all, I guess.

Christmas was a new thing to mom, and a really big part of dad’s idea of family, so we always had an extravagant family Christmas. Then, the year my sister was two, mom had to run to the hospital on an emergency call and she got hit by a drunk driver. 

Alien invasion or no, Smeckday was not our family’s worst Christmas. It barely made the top three.

Dad threw himself into being a single dad. He got an au pair, because he couldn’t do it all alone, but he sure tried. If we’d been a little older, he probably would’ve driven us both crazy, but we were still young enough to be confused and afraid and having dad constantly hanging over us was reassuring. It still got old fast, but we knew why he did it. 

He drove every teacher we ever had entirely nuts.

Christmas was hard for him, harder than it was for us. So the year I turned fourteen, he announced we were going to Happy Mouse Kingdom for Christmas. For a week. We were going to do all the Christmas things, see the shows and reclaim Christmas as a family.

It was amazing. What kid wouldn’t want to spend Christmas in the middle of a place like that?

We’d been there two days when the alien ships hit the news, and were still there when, well – the photos of the wreckage of the Snow Queen’s Castle are in most of the official records. What no one talks about is the screaming and the running and the crying.

There’s a reason for that.

We were separated from our dad. I lost my grip on his hand as the crowd stampeded, and only managed to keep hold of Anuncia because I’d been holding her up so she could see the castle better.

Funny story, our last au pair had worked at the Happy Mouse Kingdom for a while. She’d been full of stories about hidden passages and underground tunnels and the Invisible Hobo Parade. Anuncia and I had hung on her every word as she explained how the illusions worked. 

That’s why, as the crowds screamed and panicked, I fought my way with Anuncia to the nearest fake, cheery doorway, and scanned that crowd for something very specific.

Sailor Swan was taller than most of the people currently running and screaming, what with the bobbling swan head with the sailor cap, so he was pretty easy to pick out. Like me, he wasn’t running with the crowd, but letting them carry him forward as he, and the employee assigned to him, worked their way to the edge of the street and up against the buildings.

“Liu.” Anuncia had been pulling at my shoulder, and I blinked, focusing on her. Even though she was in my arms, it was hard to hear her over the crowd.

“What?”

“Where’s daddy?”

“I don’t know.” I looked back at the street, waiting for my chance. 

“We’re supposed to wait if we get separated. So he can find us.”

“That’s what we’re going to do, Nuncie.” I held her more tightly. “We can still see the castle, right?”

“R-right.” She clung to me in return, eyes wide.

“So we’ll stay close to the castle. Dad will find us.”

The running mob had slowed somewhat, so I risked it. With my little sister in her green princess dress held tightly in my arms, I dashed across the street, aiming for the little mint julep stand.

“Where are we going?”

“To find somewhere to hide until Dad finds us.” I boosted her up onto my shoulders. “Look around. Do you see Sailor Swan anywhere?”

“No. Yes! Over there.” 

Following the gesture of her fairy wand, I could see the little sailor hat, still improbably white in the afternoon sun, bobbing above the crowd as he reached the edge of the brightly painted candy store – sorry, ‘Candy Shoppe’ - and disappeared.

“He’s gone!”

“Shhh, Nuncie. Remember what Amanda said? About the Invisible Hobo Parade?”

“She said – she said that all the hobos travelled under the street. To get to the parade.”

“That’s right.” I hurried past the mint julep stand. “There has to be an entrance here somewhere. Look hard, Nuncie.”

“There! Someone’s waving to us!”

The someone in question was the lady from the Candy Shoppe. She had a humorous hat shaped like a cupcake, and was waving urgently. I ran toward her, and she shoved at the wall, opening a hidden door for us.

“This way, kids! C’mon, get off the street.”

I could see several of the other shop keepers, now that the chaos had died a little, gathering up the kids who’d been separated or lost and getting them inside. I didn’t look for long. I dashed past the bright pink and red lady and skidded into Sailor Swan’s feathery backside.

“Watch it, kid!”

For such a tough sailor type, he sure had a high-pitched voice.

His assistant was helping him pull off his head – and the girl looking back at me wasn’t much older than I was. She was a lot taller, though, and now that we were so close, I could make out that she was actually on stilts.

“Not now, kids.” A few more kids, mostly boys, were pulled in behind us before the candy lady closed the door. “ Let’s get everyone through the tunnels to the entrance, fast as we can.”

“We can’t leave!” Anuncia’s voice wobbled. “Daddy hasn’t found us yet!”

“The Happy Mouse Kingdom will get you to your parents as fast as possible,” Sailor Swan’s assistant told us, the words so rapid and sing-song as to indicate a memorized phrase. “It’s okay for you to come with us, because it is our job to help you find your parents. We’re going to go to the security office, where there are real policemen and women who will take your name and keep you safe while all of us will do our best to find your parents.”

We actually knew this, because Dad, with all his worrying and safety lectures, had made sure we knew exactly who to talk to and what would happen if we got separated. Rule one, though, was still to try to stay where we’d last seen him. Just in case we’d only been separated by the crowd. It would make the most sense to go with them – if Dad couldn’t find us right away, he’d go to the security office.

Anuncia wasn’t having it. I could tell by the sudden intake of breath that she was planning to pitch a fit, so I swung her off my shoulders and to the ground. She was normally a sweet, logical little girl – very much so for being seven, but I think alien invasion had been too much for her.

Heck, it was too much for me, and I’m fifteen.

I hugged her tight, something she’d recently declared she was too old for, and whispered, “We’ll follow them. We can always find our way back.”

She gave me a dubious look, but didn’t protest either the words or the hug. She took my hand and fell reluctantly into line with the other kids.

Despite the concrete and the very sensible and not at all colorful hallways, we could still hear people shouting outside. We could hear echoes in the hallways as they turned to tunnels, with hazard warnings whenever there were steps, and big red and blue arrows and signs. So much for the colorful whimsy above. Down here it was all about getting things done.

I could hear one of the little boys working himself into a fit over the fact that Sailor Swan wasn’t a real swan but ‘just a girl in a suit’. The resultant argument over character versus park mascot and the phrase ‘just a girl’ kept Anuncia distracted and entertained for a little while. I could’ve used the distraction myself.

The tunnels were getting crowded. Park employees had swept up as many kids and people as they could, once the stampede had eased enough that they could open the hidden doors. There were an awful lot of people down here, and everyone was moving more and more slowly. I mean, if we were all heading to the security building (which Dad had made sure to point out to us), it wasn’t very big and even just the people I could see wouldn’t fit inside.

\- and do I really need to remind you that aliens just blew up the Snow Queen’s Castle?

I think the backup was caused because people were having to go outside and not everyone wanted to.

Trying to imagine what would happen if people decided to panic in the tunnels had me slowing my steps. I still had Anuncia’s hand and I tugged on it.

“What?”

“I think we should… head back to wait for dad.” I kept it a whisper, but I knew one of the boys heard me. I scowled at him, and he looked away. “There’s a maintenance closet back at the last tunnel crossing.”

She gave me a dubious look, but straightened her flower crown and nodded. Her lip was wobbling again, now that she remembered we’d lost dad, and didn’t have any convenient little boys to fight with.

“C’mon.”

It was pretty easy to let ourselves into the closet. It wasn’t locked or anything. I guess cleaning chemicals aren’t a big deal in a place where people dress like purple elephant nobility or giant cheerful mice. I was careful not to let the door close all the way, and Anuncia and I sat and listened and waited for what seemed like hours.

It probably was, come to think of it. Anuncia ended up asleep on the floor, tangled in her tulle gown and using my leg as a pillow.

I don’t know why I decided to hide in a closet instead of go with the others to the security building. To this day, I look back and can’t deny that I knew it was a bad idea. I guess seeing bits of the Snow Queen’s Castle just… vanish, without any noise or smoke or explosions, and to see these silly, bubbly ships just bobbing there –

Maybe I was in shock. 

I just wanted to feel safe, I guess, and to be sure Anuncia was safe too. Maybe hiding was what my animal hind-brain really wanted to do, and I managed to talk myself into believing it was logic.

Dad sure wouldn’t expect me to hide us in a closet in case of alien invasion, and he wouldn’t be able to find us in a janitor’s closet somewhere under Galaxander’s Lunar Lander. 

But then, neither would the aliens.

In retrospect, the Boov weren’t really anything to be terrified of. They were horrible, and they ruined everything, but… they were tubby, weird, pop-culture sponges with an amazing ability to see themselves as the center of the universe and us as performing monkeys, I guess.

They blew up enough stuff (with enough people inside it, I bet) that it’s hard to explain just how bizarrely ineffectual they really were – once you met them on a one-on-one basis. 

As an invading horde, though, they were pretty fearsome.

That’s why my sister and I hid in a closet instead of going to see the policemen in the specially decorated ‘so as not to frighten the children’ uniforms and getting ice cream.

Because aliens.

I fell asleep too, eventually, worn out by fear and worry and having eaten way too much sugar just before everything was ruined forever. 

When I finally woke up, the tunnels were much, much quieter. Quiet enough that I could hear Anuncia snoring. She’d also been drooling on my leg, which, ewww.

There’s not a lot of story between that and the next really exciting part. When we finally got back to the Candy Shoppe, everyone was gone. The Happy Mouse Kingdom had been totally evacuated, Dad and all, and we were alone.

Well, mostly.

Nothing had been locked up, or put away, or shut down. The Happy Mouse Kingdom had its own power grid, so while all the lights had been shut off (probably to make it harder to evaporate anything else) the toilets still worked and some of the shops still had freezers that were on.

Like the ice cream shop. I’ve never been so sick in my life.

Anuncia wanted to go home. She wanted to go home and find Dad and everything would be fine.

I may’ve lied to her, just a little, about the aliens. And maybe bribed her with some of the candy from the Candy Shoppe. And maybe let her play dress up at the pretty booth where Dad had gotten her that green and yellow dress.

So we stayed at the Happy Mouse Kingdom. We’d venture out into the park during the day, keeping an eye out for aliens and sleeping in our maintenance closet at night. By ‘venture’ I mean ‘used the tunnels and connecting doors’. I was scared to go outside, to go out where those stupid, hovering ships might see us. It might’ve been irrational, but I didn’t care.

We made a bed out of souvenir t-shirts for the Vocabularcoaster, and moved all the cleaning supplies off the shelves and out into the hallway so Anuncia could decorate it with toys from the abandoned ‘Shoot a Bullseye to WIN!’ games and posters and knickknacks from the shops.

I didn’t feel bad about it. We weren’t stealing. The stuff never left the park, after all, and we had passes that promised us all we could eat at the restaurants and participating shops. There were bathrooms with showers and changing rooms for the employees like Sailor Swan, and the water was still running – so that was good.

After the first day, I started looking for a phone. I knew they had them in the shops, and I wanted to try to call Dad and let him know where we were. After I figured out how to dial outside the park, I discovered that all the lines were clogged with shrieking gobbledygook. We found an employee lounge with a tv and a lot of abandoned personal possessions (I convinced Anuncia we could use the toothbrush I found in one of the lockers after I washed it twenty times), but the tv only showed us static.

I eventually found a radio, but even that didn’t help much – until it started shouting in very bad English (Dad would’ve been appalled by the lack of proper grammar) about how all of humanity was going to be moving to Florida.

Even I knew that they wouldn’t all fit. Not unless they started sleeping five or six to a tree in every island of the Everglades.

I started packing up food and clothing and other things we might need. I mean, if they were moving everyone to Florida, they’d have some kind of system in place, right? To check? We could find a policeman or something and give them dad’s name and hey, presto!

Right?

By then we’d become aware of the small tribe of boys who had taken up living under the Snow Queen’s Castle. 

Yeah, that’s another thing. So the thing Amanda never told us was that the entire park was on trap doors. Kind of. Two of everything, up and down, for cleaning and repairs and messing with children’s idea of reality. Some of the boys from our group had decided to stay too and were setting up some kind of weird ‘Lord of the Flies’ civilization down there.

Well, not really ‘Lord of the Flies’. They wouldn’t know how to organize a proper tribe if they had a manual, and I’m pretty sure none of them were violent. Anuncia and I avoided them and, while I was sure they knew we were there, they avoided us too. I kept the radio with me, but kept it turned down really low. I didn’t really want to hear about how all the humans were so happy to be moving to Florida, hooray, but it was better than just wandering around in silence, wondering. 

I took Anuncia and our Snow Queen bags to the shopping area and we got new Happy Mouse Kingdom shoes and sleeping bags and everything I thought we might need until we managed to catch up with Dad. I’d just found Anuncia a Happy Mouse Kingdom Camera with Real Video Recording, shaped like Sailor Swan’s face, when the radio’s muttering got – strange.

This in comparison to, say, the day it warbled for four straight minutes about how wonderful mixing dental floss with those little dishwashing tablets for your dishwasher was. It was like one of those cooking shows where they tell you to just mix up a selection of non-food items and make it edible – only, in this case, totally not.

I turned it up just in time to catch the end of some sort of high-pitched promotion of the glory of oranges – and the beginning of the worst thing I’d ever heard. Including the lessons in how to properly pronounce ‘Boov’.

I sat down on the floor of the store, staring at the radio, ignoring the flash as Anuncia took my picture. I don’t know how long I sat there, staring and not really paying attention, until Anuncia kicked me in the leg.

“What?”

“I said, ‘where’s Arizona’?”

Let’s be honest here. Thus far, my decision-making abilities had been proven to be pretty terrible. I’d stranded myself and my little sister in a maintenance closet because I was too afraid to go outside. Bedtime had gone right out the window, and I’m sure Dad would yell at me for the things I’d been letting Anuncia eat and wear and play with.

Still, I was pretty sure trying to get myself and my seven-year-old sister to Arizona was not something in power to do. Not without having to go outside anyway, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. Not by a long shot.

Besides, if we left, who’d keep an eye on Pancake?

Yet another on the long list of things which Amanda never told us about the Happy Mouse Kingdom was the cats. Apparently, the cleanest and happiest place in the world had kind of a problem with mice, rats and other small scavengers. I mean, invite a bunch of little kids to your house, hand them some popcorn and see how long it takes you to find all of it. So yeah, mice and rats and that’s not something you want in your advertising.

So what the Happy Mouse Kingdom also had was a really large group of mostly feral cats. I guess cat poop is easier to clean up than rat or mouse poop, and easier to explain and forgive than finding rodents in your very expensive food court.

We met Pancake on our third or fourth night at the park. I guess he heard us inside the costume shop and decided he wanted to come inside. I can’t blame him. I could hear thunder, and the wind was starting to pick up. I could also hear some very enthusiastic scratching at the door.

“Liu?” Anuncia had jumped at the sound and was trying to hide behind a large, cardboard castle.

“It’s just one of the cats.” I opened the door, I’m still not sure why. Probably because I was still afraid of the outside world, and maybe I felt sorry for the cat.

He came whizzing inside and vanished under one of the carts of silly hats. I only saw him for an instant, but I was really impressed. I’d never seen such a very large cat before. I hadn’t seen many cats before at all, because Dad was allergic, but this one was huge.

“Hey, cat.”

He (I didn’t know he was a he at the time, I just assumed) hissed at me. Enthusiastically.

“Liu,” in a whisper, as Anuncia attempted to climb the castle, “maybe it’s rabid.”

“In Happy Mouse Kingdom?” Okay, so it wasn’t a logical response. I was still scared and lonely (and anyone who’s ever had a sibling will tell you that, sometimes, they just don’t count) and it was a living thing that needed me. “Here, cat.”

He ignored me.

When we eventually went back to our closet, I left the door open behind us. Anuncia reported that he followed us back to our closet, and he was sleeping on my feet in the morning, but he ran away the minute I moved.

This went on for a few days before he finally let us actually pet him. Anuncia named him ‘Pancake’ for his habit of lying down and sort of… spreading out. Like a pancake. For a huge, occasionally intimidating Siamese cat, he had no dignity at all. Pancake suited him.

So – Arizona was out of the question. Going outside was bad enough. Leaving Pancake behind was just not going to happen. Anuncia had found a stash of canned tuna in one of the tiny employee lounges and had been feeding him. We couldn’t abandon him now.

Dad would just have to get some kind of medication. If we ever saw him again.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to sit down and cry for a while, while the Boov announcer went on about how wonderful Arizona would be and whoops, sorry for the inconvenience. We couldn’t go to Arizona. There was just no way – and I knew, knew that Dad wouldn’t leave Florida without us. We had to stay here, where he’d last seen us.

I stopped sniffling, eventually, convinced Anuncia to delete all the pictures of me crying, and gathered up our now-packed and totally useless luggage. We’d even found a rolling pet carrier (naturally covered with decals to proclaim the pet had been to Happy Mouse Kingdom which, by the way, does not allow pets) for Pancake. We rolled it all back to our maintenance closet, fed Pancake, and tried to figure out what to do next.

“We have to wait for Dad.”

“Yeah, but – it’s not enough just to wait. Sooner or later, the power will go out, or we’ll get cavities from all the candy, or we’ll get sick – and what do we do then?”

Anuncia actually considered this. “Maybe if we turned ourselves in, the Boov would find Dad?”

I knew I’d regret letting her watch all those cop shows when Dad was working late.

“It doesn’t work like that, Anuncia. They blew up the Snow Queen’s Castle! They’re shipping all the humans to Florida! I don’t think that if we just show up and ask them to find Dad, that they’ll stop what they’re doing to help us out.”

Her lower lip started to wobble, and I tried to gain control of my temper. “Look, Nuncia, I’m sorry. We know Dad is still looking for us – but I don’t think just hiding here is going to help him find us.”

“But you’re the one afraid to –“

I threw one of the stuffed elephants at her. She squawked and ducked and by the time she’d recovered, I had a plan.

“We can find a way to send a message. Or leave a message. This place is full of paint – I bet we could leave Dad a message somewhere. To let him know where we are.”

I didn’t say it was a good plan.

At this point, we hadn’t seen a Boov. Not one. We’d heard them, speaking their grammatically backward English on the radio, but we hadn’t seen any. For all we knew, they looked like Godzilla and breathed lava.

I probably shouldn’t’ve sat up after Anuncia went to bed and watched old monster movies.

We spent the next day looking for the paint workshop. There were signs in the tunnels, but the Happy Mouse Kingdom is big. Really big. It’s the Texas of theme parks. We took snacks and a backpack, and Pancake decided to accompany us.

It took almost an hour to convince Anuncia that bright yellow was not really the best color to try to leave a message in. We finally compromised on orange and black. Then we had to decide what to say.

“They speak English.”

“That doesn’t mean they speak Spanish.”

“That doesn’t mean they don’t.”

This went on for hours. We finally settled on the only thing we could think of that would tell Dad where we were, but would probably be hard for an alien to figure out.

Our mom knew seven languages. She was only fluent in three, but she read and wrote four others. When I was born, she and dad were both determined that I would be able to read and write their language just as well as English. Anuncia only has a little Cantonese, though she’s pretty good with Spanish. I can read and write standard Cantonese pretty well, and we decided on a message that the aliens probably wouldn’t manage to decipher.

Hooray for parents who over share. Without Dad’s many stories about their dating disasters, this would’ve been much harder to do.

Not that it was easy. You try writing, in Cantonese, ‘Remember the story of our third date? Our children do, Love – ‘ I signed it ‘Maria’ because that is what Dad called her. Mostly because she’d gotten tired of his heroic attempts to properly pronounce her name and his continual mangling of it.

It’s hard to paint proper Cantonese at a large size on pavement, in the dark by the light of a flashlight, when your hands are shaking because it’s the first time you’ve been outside in weeks. I made big, sloppy strokes in the bright orange and let Anuncia outline them with the black, so they looked a little more legible.

Dad might not have been able to pronounce Cantonese, but he learned to read it and write it when Mom taught it to me, and he was the one who made sure I continued to take lessons and use it after she died. He’d know who wrote this, and he’d remember the story about how he asked her to meet him in the maintenance tunnels beneath the university residence (because the weather outside was bad) and somehow the message had become asking her to meet him in one of the maintenance closets.

She’d been surprised and mildly offended, but they did get married and laugh about it later.

He’d figure it out. Dad was smart.

I was shaking like a leaf by the time we were finished. This was the first time I’d been outside since Christmas. Well, Smeckday. They still talked about it on the radio, so we knew now what it was called, but the only news we had came through the Boov and they had a really weird idea of what ‘news’ was.

We dragged the paint cans and the brushes back inside the doorway of the nearby movie theatre and abandoned them there. With Pancake’s faithful (and tuna-fuelled) company, we made our way through the connecting tunnels to the bright blue ‘fire tower’ next door.

We’d brought our sleeping bags and borrowed some weird stuffed animal/pillow abominations from the inevitable souvenir counter in the movie theatre. We settled down to wait for the dawn, so we could see how well our message turned out.

If you guessed that we fell asleep almost immediately and slept through the sunrise, you’re right. 

Anuncia woke me up, shaking me and whispering. “Wake up! Wake up!”

“Wha- “

“Shhh.”

Her eyes were wide and afraid and she clung to me. “There’s someone down there.”

I struggled my way free of the sleeping bag and crept to the edge of the tower to peer down.

I’m going to assume that you’ve seen footage of the Boov, or pictures. Everyone knows what they look like now, but Anuncia and I hadn’t seen anything more than a few ships, and they’d hardly been close.

This one was… anti-climactic. With the hovering bubble-ships and the mysterious disappearance of two-thirds of the Snow Queen’s Castle, I’d been imagining something, well, more like Godzilla or the Terminator.

The words ‘short’, ‘squat’, ‘dumpy’, ‘damp’ and ‘tentacles’ had never figured in. Well, maybe tentacles, but more horror tentacles and less Squidward.

He was extremely unimpressive. He was also being trailed by somewhere between ten and twenty cats. They kept bounding up to him and snuggling up and then bounding away again. He seemed surprised, but not upset, and they weren’t slowing him down much.

Not that he was moving very fast. He was wandering from building to building, staring up at them and fiddling with a – a thing. I couldn’t see it very clearly and didn’t want to. 

“It’s a Boov,” Anuncia told me, clinging to my arm. “Let’s throw something at it.”

I turned, surprised. My little sister had never, ever been the sort to advocate violence. There was a glint in her eye and a scowl on her face.

“We don’t want to throw anything at it. What if it makes us disappear?”

She flinched and withdrew to peer over my shoulder. I was shaking a little as I watched the tubby little creature wander down the street. It seemed very interested in the doorways and windows, and we clung to each other, hoping it didn’t actually open any of them. Our safe haven wasn’t so safe anymore.

“Are you going to be afraid to go inside now?”

If I hadn’t loved my little sister very, very much, I might’ve actually thought about throwing her at the Boov. Luckily, sisterly love and better sense prevailed. “Come on. We can’t stay here if the Boov are moving in. We – we’ll have to move to Arizona.”

“We can’t leave! We already painted the message.”

I said it wasn’t a very good plan, didn’t I?

We argued for a little while, quietly, and then headed back to our closet, Pancake wandering along behind.

Anuncia and I moved all the abandoned cleaning supplies out of the hallway that led to our maintenance closet. We found some binoculars at one of the shops, toy binoculars, but good enough for us, and started spending a lot of time in the fire tower. 

We saw more Boov, though never more than two or three at a time, and all of them were trailed by the feral cats that called the Happy Mouse Kingdom home. They wandered around, pointing instruments at things and poking into corners and planting things. We also saw the occasional animal that had probably escaped from the nearby animal park – which was another good reason to stay inside.

After a day or two of their puttering, it was hard to stay scared of them. It was probably because they were puttering. They weren’t marching or setting fire to things or blowing things up, they just poked and prodded and muttered to themselves and… Squidwarded around.

I couldn’t tell them apart, but Anuncia decided that one of them was the first one, and christened him Squidward. It made conversation somewhat difficult and possibly copyright infringing.

Boov-watching became a sort of sport to pass the time, while we waited for Dad to find our message. It was something we clung to as we saw more and more Boov wandering the streets of the Happy Mouse Kingdom. Some of them noticed the message, some of them even pointed their little devices at it, but none of them really did anything about it.

As days passed and even Anuncia got sick of candy, nothing really changed. The Boov wandered the abandoned, Technicolor streets, the boys did whatever they did down below the Snow Queen’s Castle, Pancake started sleeping on my knees instead of my feet and I began to lose hope that Dad might find us.

That was when things went from bad to worse.

Our first indication that the Boov weren’t the worst thing to happen to us and our planet came, surprisingly enough, from the radio. I had stopped carrying it with me, not wanting to alert the Boov to our presence, and being tired of having to keep ‘borrowing’ new batteries every day or so. I still turned it on every night, just to see if the Boov had changed their mind and were bringing everyone back to Florida, or if maybe Dad managed to hijack a radio station to let us know he was coming.

He was such a worrier, such a hoverer, always wanting to make sure we were okay. Our absence must be driving him up the wall.

I tried not to think about it too much.

Anyway, the radio. I turned it on every night, just to see if the Boov had anything new to share, other than amazing recipes that nothing human would ever eat or more songs of praise to the glorious orange peel, or more ‘Fun Facts about the Glorious Captain Smeck’.

They didn’t.

Well, usually.

That night, they had a lot to say, most of it very high-pitched and panicky and featuring many, many repetitions of the word Gorg. It took a while to make any sense of the babbling, but it seemed to boil down to ‘Cheese it, the Cops!’.

After a night of happy dreams about some sort of cosmic warriors come to send the Boov packing and rescue all of humanity, make Anuncia their princess (it was a dream, just roll with it) and bring us back our Dad – I woke to further details.

All the cheerful dreams were apparently just a few moments of childlike delusion.

Apparently, this was more like waking from a bad dream where there was a monster under the bed to discover that the one in the closet is not only much bigger and scarier, it has a flamethrower.

The Gorg, according to the Boov, were horrible monsters, come to eat us all, and everyone should take cover and possibly throw things at anything that wasn’t obviously a Boov.

I took it with a grain of salt, but the Boov were certainly panicking. 

We watched Squidward scuttle about the empty streets, frantically pointing at things and frequently staring upward nervously. He resembled his cartoon namesake more than ever. 

I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

Then we got our first good look at the Gorg, or at least their ships – and what those ships did to the Boov.

Anuncia stopped making fun of me for being afraid to go outside. We huddled together with Pancake in our closet, only leaving to creep to the nearby bathroom, and only together. It’s hard to tell the passage of time down in the tunnels and we didn’t have a clock, but it was quite some time before we got up the courage to go back upstairs.

That and we’d run out of peanut butter and crackers and tuna for Pancake.

I tried not to keep too much food in the maintenance closet because of the rats, but I was starting to reconsider. 

Anuncia and I crept up to the familiar Candy Shoppe, Pancake in tow, and found ourselves with a front row view to a drama that eventually would save the human race. Not that we realized it at the time.

The first thing we saw, when we peered carefully out of the artistically and artificially snow-frosted window, was Squidward. He was scuttling madly down the street, diving to take cover in the doorway of our Shoppe. 

We held our breaths and scrunched up really small as five or six cats squeezed into the doorway with him. He was breathing really quickly and making a tiny, high-pitched sound that we suddenly realized was probably panic.

Suddenly, because that’s when four very large, very scary looking creatures loomed into view out in the street.

“They’re going to see Squidward,” Anuncia hissed. “And then they’ll find us.”

We stared at each other, feeling a lot of panic ourselves, and I saw my hand reaching for the doorknob. I didn’t mean to open the door. I didn’t want to rescue a Boov. But those other guys? They weren’t short and squat and ridiculous and sort of fit into the whole weird otherworldliness of the Happy Mouse Kingdom.

They didn’t remind me of a kid’s cartoon.

I grabbed the Boov, who gave a started shriek, and dragged him inside. The cats followed.

“Shhh,” Anuncia told him, attempting to cover his wide mouth with her hands. “They’ll hear you.”

That was apparently enough for Squidward, who abruptly shut up. Pancake gave us all a dissatisfied look from atop the giant lollipop display, and we all huddled together behind the door, cats and all.

We had no idea what saved us, or why the towering Gorg with their big guns suddenly decided to turn around and head the other way at high speed. All we knew was that we had been discovered by the Boov and were now in a lot of trouble, probably going to be shipped away to Arizona and – well, things could be worse.

It could’ve been the Gorg. 

We all shivered together until we were sure they were really gone, and that’s when Squidward sort of… deflated.

“They were to be murdering me,” he squeaked. “All of the dying.”

We shrugged.

“You blew up the Snow Queen’s Castle, “ Anuncia pointed out, with the true horror and scorn of a child who is too old for Santa Claus, but still believes in fairies. “You’re a bad alien.”

He looked… well, it was hard to read his expression, but I’m going to go with ‘shocked’. “Am a nice alien.”

We just glared at him, and he deflated some more. “I am to being Brittany,” he announced, trying to offer Anuncia a hand.

“That’s a girl’s name!”

The Boov blinked at her. “I am being a boyboygirl. Is it not a name for me? I like it.”

“Your name,” she announced, “is Squidward.”

“I am a Spongebob?”

I stared, shocked into silence by the pure surrealism of it all, topped off by the fact that the Boov apparently watched Spongebob Squarepants.

“You are a Squidward.” Anuncia was firm. “So act like it.”

“Like to be a bad clarinet player?” Squidward looked somewhat confused. I think. It was really hard to tell, really. Squidward was less deflated now, more Boov-shaped, which might have been a good sign.

“Yes.”

“Why,” I asked, trying to gain some control over the situation, “are the Gorg trying to kill you?”

“Because they are to be murdering everyone. It is what they do!”

“And the Boov don’t?”

Squidward gave me another of those confused looks. “We are to being nice aliens! To be giving you new things and a better life in Arizona! You are to like living there! It is like a zoo!”

“The zoo is not for the benefit of the animals,” I pointed out flatly.

An explosion outside had us all diving for cover, and brought an end to the conversation. “We should go back to our closet,” I whispered, fending off one of the strange cats, who apparently wanted to be friends.

“Yes,” Squidward agreed.

“Not you.”

Squidward deflated again. “They will be to murdering me. And they will be forcing me to tell them about the human childrens hiding here.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Squidward was making that high-pitched sound again and obviously not listening.

“FINE!”

Which is how we ended up with a Boov, seven cats and, for some odd reason, a giant box of laundry detergent in our maintenance closet.

We missed most of the following excitement. According to later reports, the Gorg in the park ended up exploding, due to over-exposure to the very, very large population of feral cats.

While this was going on, Anuncia was teaching Squidward how to play card games while I convinced the new cats to go away, which was very hard and eventually involved super-soakers.

Pancake didn’t care. As long as he got tuna, any number of strange cats could move into our closet. I was very disappointed in him and his lack of territorialism.

Squidward was introduced to the showers, again by Anuncia, and I was starting to be disturbed by how well they were getting along. Luckily, I didn’t have to get used to it.

When the park had been evacuated, Dad had been forcibly moved all the way to Gainesville. After finding out that we hadn’t been amongst the other evacuees, he’d started trying to get back to the park.

He eventually had to steal a bicycle and try to sneak his way back down to the Happy Mouse Kingdom. It took him a long, long time. Once he found his way to the park, he had to find us. Somehow. In several square miles of park, and he couldn’t just run around shouting our names – there were Boov in the park before he got there. 

He had to go room to room, store to store, building to building, most of which had all the lights shut off when the employees left, and none of the switches were obvious, because they didn’t want the guests fussing with them.

I forget how many weeks we were in the park together and never saw each other – but he found our message right around the time the Gorg arrived.

The problem that both Anuncia and I had forgotten, was that a park this size would have literally hundreds of maintenance closets. At least he was able to figure out we were underground.

He finally found us because Anuncia and Squidward were arguing about who the real hero of Spongebob Squarepants was, and the argument had gotten rather heated. I wish I had ever gotten up the courage to ask him what he’d thought, when bursting into a room at the sound of his youngest daughter’s raised voice, and found her attempting to put a Boov in a purple tutu into a headlock, her efforts somewhat hampered by the giant, matching felt squid hat Squidward was wearing.

I had to go find a first aid box and get some Benedryl before we could ask him anything, because our entire closet was liberally coated in Pancake’s fur.

By then, Gorg were exploding all over, and before we’d finished outfitting a new closet, Squidward in tow (now in a fetching tiara that kept sliding off), my radio was announcing that there was peace between humans and Boov, the Boov would to be leaving now, and hooray for the defeat of the Gorg.

It was somewhat anti-climactic, honestly.

We never left the Happy Mouse Kingdom. We never went further than a couple of hours from home. We… acquired a Boov. Anuncia pitched a fit when it was suggested Squidward go home with the other Boov, and Squidward appeared to have acquired something of a tutu and fairy princess wing habit.

Apparently, tulle is delicious, as well as attractive.

So Dad got himself a prescription for allergy shots, Squidward acquired legal paperwork announcing that we now had a Boov nanny for Anuncia, Pancake took over our house – and I still don’t like to go outside much.

It’s weird, really. Anuncia and I don’t really have any negative feelings toward Squidward, though we should. We never saw the Boov, until they were just these scuttling creatures in the Happy Mouse Kingdom, a place where they’d’ve fit right in without any actual costumes.

\- and Squidward, apparently, always wanted to be a fashion designer, not that the Boov had any concept of fashion until they reached Earth, apparently. Once Anuncia was too old to require a nanny, Squidward decided to launch a fashion line, and Anuncia declared she was going to college in order to help Squidward with marketing.

Mom would’ve approved.

Me? I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. Squidward and Anuncia don’t really clearly remember what life used to be, and I’m still trying to get used to this weird new world. Dad wants me to find out what I want to do with my life, but he’s not pushing.

He hugs us a lot, even now, and sometimes comes to check on us at night (even Squidward) just to be sure we’re still here.

Maybe Dad needs me to hang around. I could be at home in a biochem lab – preferably one without too many windows. 

I’ll probably be the only one there dressed entirely in yellow tulle, but I can learn to live with it. Anuncia and Squidward would insist.


End file.
